The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

by Sarah Weinman

The narrator is consumed by the girl lying supine on the bed, robe half-open, and begins “little by little to cast his spell . . . passing his magic wand above her body,” measuring her “with an enchanted yardstick.” Here, again, Humbert Humbert would sneer. But then he did not have the girl look “wild-eyed at his rearing nudity,” caught out like the pedophile he is.

Humbert is all about self-justification; Volshebnik’s narrator suffers no such delusion about his quarry.

As the scholar Simon Karlinsky wrote when Volshebnik was finally published in English as The Enchanter in 1986, the novella’s pleasure is “comparable to the one afforded by studying Beethoven’s published sketchbooks: seeing the murky and unpromising material out of which the writer and the composer were later able to fashion an incandescent masterpiece.”

art is fickle and merciless, as Nabokov explained repeatedly throughout his life. Volshebnik possesses a powerful engine of its own. It does not possess Lolita’s literary trickery and mastery of obfuscation, which continue to make moral mincemeat out of the novel’s wider readership. Here, instead, is a more prosaic depiction of deviant compulsion and tragic consequences.

Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert’s first love, is named in homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” The novel’s working title, The Kingdom by the Sea, is a quote from that poem, and Humbert’s memories of his Annabel, dead of typhus four months after their seaside near-consummation, echo many more of Poe’s lines.

Lolita also owes a great deal to an influence never explicitly referenced in the text, but one Nabokov knew well from translating into Russian in his early twenties: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Yeeeeeah that makes an uncomfortable amount of sense.

Not long after the Nabokovs immigrated to America in May 1940, arriving in New York on the SS Champlain, Lanz arranged for Nabokov to teach at Stanford. Their friendship grew over regular chess games; Nabokov beat Lanz more than two hundred times. Over these jousts Lanz revealed his predilections—specifically, that he most enjoyed seducing young girls and he loved to watch them urinate. Four years later, Lanz was dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

Such a denial makes sense, in light of other future denials of real-life influence. Yet the months Nabokov spent being peppered with stories from a known pederast could not help but inform his fiction—and further bolster his involuntary, unconscious need to unspool this particular, horrible narrative.

Unlike Humbert Humbert, there was nothing erudite about Frank La Salle. His prison writings are unreliable, lacking the silky sheen that is Lolita’s narrative hallmark; grammatical mistakes pepper La Salle’s rambling and incoherent oral and typewritten declamations.

La Salle was a crude, slippery figure, who lied so much in middle age that it was impossible for me to verify the facts of the first four decades of his life.

Without knowing the substance of his childhood and upbringing, and whether or not his predilections asserted themselves early on, it was difficult for me to determine where he came by his long-running desire for young girls. La Salle behaved as a pedophile, but it’s hard to say whether that was his orientation—compulsion spurring opportunity—or he impulsively seized on opportunity as a means of asserting power.

Frank La Salle was probably not his birth name. Once, he said that his parents were Frank Patterson and Nora LaPlante. Another time he wrote down their names as Frank La Salle and Nora Johnson. He hailed from Indianapolis, or perhaps Chicago. He said he served four years at the Leavenworth, Kansas, federal prison between 1924 and 1928 on a bootlegging charge, but the prison has no record of him being there during those years. He needed a new origin story every time he changed aliases, among them Patterson, Johnson, LaPlante, and O’Keefe. As far as I could find out, the first name almost never varied.

In the summer of 1937, Fogg had a wife and a nine-year-old son. They lived in a trailer in Maple Shade, New Jersey. He claimed that his wife took their son and ran away with a mechanic. It’s possible that might be true. By July 14 they were gone, and just over a week later Fogg himself would become a fugitive, with a new wife in tow.

He met her at a carnival: Dorothy Dare,

Oh come on

He was more than twice as old as Dorothy, but she didn’t mind the age difference. He wanted to marry her and she thought it was a terrific idea to elope. Which they did, only a few days after meeting, to Elkton, Maryland, the “Gretna Green of the United States,” where weddings happened fast with few questions asked.

Even if she was not, technically, a minor, she was young, and this Fogg fellow was clearly not. When Dare discovered that Fogg was using a fake name, and was actually married, he got local police to swear out an eight-state warrant for the man’s arrest on kidnapping and statutory rape charges on July 22, 1937. He claimed that Dorothy was fifteen, and thus a minor. The law caught up with the couple ten days later.

The two had a surprise for the arresting officers: Dorothy was not a minor, their Elkton marriage was legit, and Frank had the certificate, dated July 31, to prove it.

The next morning, La Salle appeared in Delaware Township court. Dorothy was not there; nor did anyone know her whereabouts. Her father, however, was very much present. When he spotted La Salle, he punched the other man in the jaw.

Two years later, when Madeline was three, Dorothy sued Frank for desertion and nonpayment of child support. Dare family lore had it that Dorothy discovered her husband in a car with another woman, and grew so enraged she hit the other woman over the head with her shoe.

THREE CAMDEN POLICE OFFICERS walked into a restaurant on Broadway near the corner of Penn and spotted a girl sitting alone in a booth. Women sitting by themselves in public at three in the morning still stand out. Imagine what the cops thought in the early 1940s when they stumbled across a twelve-year-old girl all on her own so late in the night.

Under gentle coaxing by police sergeant John V. Wilkie, the girl opened up. She admitted she’d been out that night because she “had a date with a man about 40 years old.”

Iiiick

In his report, Wilkie wrote that the girl said La Salle had “forced her into intimacies.” The girl almost certainly used plainer language. She also told Wilkie that La Salle made her introduce him to four of her friends by threatening to tell her mother what she had done with him.

Police got a tip La Salle and his family now lived at a house on the 1000 block on Cooper Street. They kept the place under constant surveillance, hoping he might turn up. On the evening of March 15, a car pulled up in front of the house. The car had a license number linked to La Salle. Detectives rushed into the house. They found and arrested a nineteen-year-old man who claimed he was La Salle’s brother-in-law. But no La Salle. “We found out later,” Wilkie said, “that as detectives walked up the front steps, La Salle made his escape out the back door.”

cops got a tip that La Salle now lived at 1414 Euclid Avenue in Philadelphia, in the heart of where Temple University stands today.

She moved quickly to divorce him, filing a petition on January 11, 1944, stating that La Salle had “committed adultery” with the five girls beginning on March 9, 1942—the night the first girl reported her rape to police—and “at various times” between that date and February 1943, when La Salle was finally arrested. Frank wrote her frequently from prison—a habit he would repeat later in life—but if he meant to persuade Dorothy to stay married to him, he was not successful.

La Salle found work as a car mechanic in Philadelphia, but found himself in repeated trouble with the law. An indecent assault charge was dropped on Halloween, but the following August, he got caught at Camden’s Third National Bank trying to pass off a forged $110 check.

La Salle returned to Trenton State Prison on March 18, 1946, to serve eighteen months to five years on the new charges. The clock also began again on the balance of the statutory rape sentence. La Salle finished up both those sentences in January 1948, and was paroled again on the fifteenth of that month.

Where abduction carried a maximum prison sentence of only a few years, a kidnapping conviction upped the ante to between thirty and thirty-five years—effectively, for someone of Frank La Salle’s age, a life sentence.

Other sensational local crimes pushed her out of the papers, including a mass shooting on Camden’s East Side and another mysterious disappearance: that of the wife of Jules Forstein, a Philadelphia magistrate.

When Jules got home at 11:30 P.M. Dorothy was gone and the children were frantic. They claimed a stranger had come into the house, knocked their mother unconscious, and then hefted the five-foot-two, 125-pound woman, clad in pajamas and red slippers, over his shoulder, carrying her out and locking the door behind them. Before he left, he patted Marcy on the head and told her, “Go back to sleep.”

A thousand-dollar reward offered by Jules Forstein yielded no new leads. Dorothy was declared legally dead eight years later, in 1957, a year after her husband had died of a heart attack at home.

SALLY’S FAMILY took the waning public interest as a sign that it was better not to speak of her disappearance, even among themselves. Her absence was a low thrum, ever-present but unacknowledged.

Ella remained at 944 Linden Street, but living there was like a nightmare. “It was so different when Sally was here,” she later recalled. “She was so cheerful and full of life.”

Sally Horner disappeared a few months after Mitchell Cohen was appointed as prosecutor for Camden County, a ten-year term that would last until 1958. He was already on the way to becoming the pivotal law enforcement figure in the city, a status that saw his name emblazoned, decades later, on the downtown federal courthouse.

In the late 1940s, Camden County did not have enough major crime to justify a full-time prosecutor.

Woof

Cohen’s term as prosecutor was one of many jobs he held in law enforcement over a long legal career that stretched from early private practice with local law firms all the way to chief judge for the federal district court of New Jersey. He moved smoothly between prosecuting criminals and delivering judgments.

Before the latter show opened in 1956, Levin told Cohen to “hock everything he had in the world” to invest in the production. Cohen did, and reaped the benefits as My Fair Lady smashed box-office records.

Cohen cared about the law and about being fair. He believed it was as important to know when not to prosecute a case as when to prosecute.

Wanda’s body was discovered on the morning of August 8, 1939, in an area near Camden High School frequently used as a lovers’ lane. A corsage of red and white roses adorned her neck. The killer strangled her so forcefully that he broke her collarbone and breastbone. Then he dropped a rock onto her head, fracturing her skull.

Yikes

Four months before her murder, in April 1939, two men had accosted Wanda on the street and thrown her into their car. They beat her up—a near-fatal assault—and tossed her out into a field in a desolate part of Salem County, just south of Camden.

The fuck?!

His teenage daughter troubled him, especially after her mother, Theresa, collapsed at the breakfast table and died in 1938. He brooded over Wanda’s fondness for the opposite sex, lecturing her about preserving her virtue, verbally abusing her in such a way to make an example of her to her younger siblings, Mildred and Alfred.

The secret Walter Dworecki should have tried harder to keep was his fondness for hanging around Philadelphia dives, looking for men who might be willing and able to kill his daughter.

Iiiiiick

Dworecki eventually confessed in a statement that ran to nearly thirty pages. The preacher admitted to being aggrieved by Wanda’s behavior, but he claimed the idea to kill Wanda originated with two men, Joe Rock and John Popolo, whom he’d met in Philadelphia.

Both men entered guilty pleas in Camden County Court on August 29, 1939. Dworecki refused to look at anyone. Shewchuk chose the opposite tack, smiling whenever someone caught his eye. Then Mitchell Cohen, the city prosecutor, explained to the assembled crowd, including the surprised defendants and their lawyers, why the guilty pleas had to be thrown out. New Jersey state law at the time stipulated that one was not allowed to be sentenced to death if he pleaded guilty. Capital cases, and murder certainly counted, required that the defendants face a full trial, verdict, and sentencing.

Dworecki was put to death by electric chair on March 28, 1940. Before his execution, he implored his surviving children, Mildred and Alfred, to lead pious lives and asked that “God have mercy on their souls.” Dworecki’s grave lies next to that of the daughter he murdered.

Five days later, Rita was found naked and dead at the bottom of a cistern near a sewage disposal plant. An autopsy determined that she had been raped, beaten bloody, and tossed into the cistern alive. She died of suffocation.

Auld recounted an all-too-familiar, all-too-horrible story: after the dance, he had made a move on Rita that she turned down. He got angry, punched her in the face, and choked her until she passed out. Auld claimed he felt for a pulse and, when he found none, dumped her into the cistern.

Coward

Auld’s new court-appointed attorney, John Morrissey— Palese had since been appointed as a judge—implored the jury to be lenient toward his client, “a feeble-minded boy,” and deliver a not-guilty verdict by reason of insanity.

Boy huh

Stranger abductions are rare now and were, perhaps, even rarer when Sally vanished.

Abductions where the child is held for a significant period of time before being rescued alive occur with even lesser frequency.